rewriting urls gives wrong path

Hi there!
I'm trying to gain some knowledge on rewriting urls but with
poor results...
I've got a webpage of this structure
/
css/
images/
main/
about.html
photos.html
links/
games.html
photos.html
i.php

Now I'd like to make some rewriting rules that do:
/ -> /i.php?p=main&s=about
/main/photos -> /i.php?p=main&s=photos
and so on.

The i.php script simply includes necessary pages. I'm also
using smarty for this.
The first part is that for every rewriting url guide I read
it says something like this ^/main$. But it doesn't even
match /main! When I check rewriting log I see that my apache
(v. 2.0.4 splits 'http://localhost/main' into 'main' and the rule
doesn't match. If I make the rule as ^main$ it loads the file ok
but it loses all structure; ie all requests for images go to
/main/images instead to /images.

My peace is lost and I just gave up after 2 days of reading. All hope
with you. Thanks.
--
Marcin Gil | RLU# 221865 :: email# mgil at vernet pl
"Dentharg" | G-G# 185057 :: JID# dentharg at chrome pl